I'm back from Telluride (the thousands at the blue grass festival are at the bottom, this was taken from very high above it.) It's really hard to picture a more scenic spot.

The flight back was very long...I could have driven the seven hours from Telluride to Denver in the time it took to fly back (a one hour flight) due to the winds being too gusty to take off so we sat on the runway forever to wait for the winds to shift. The plane actually ran low on gas after an hour on the runway so we had to deplane while they refueled and wait for the winds to die down It's an 18 seater but it can't fly full because of weight issues even without winds. When the winds exceed 10 knots, flights aren't allowed to take off. Instead of landing in Denver at 4:30 pm, we landed at 7:30 pm.

When you do take off from Telluride, as soon as the plane lifts, the ground drops thousands of feet beneath you. It's a very eerie feeling that makes quite a few people ill. Since I knew to expect it, I enjoyed it.

I'm really glad to be home, but blogging will have to wait until sometime tomorrow after I decompress, and have organized the 300 plus photos I took, so here's an open thread.

Mother Jones runs a rather overwrought and, in my view, wrongheaded article discussing the A-List Bloggers as "The New Gatekeepers." I think the problem is a different one, as I outlined in my post The Dangerous Cooptation of the Blogosphere. The thrust of my post was this:

What is Digby suggesting? That the blogs/Netroots not give its true opinions? That we pull our punches? This is a very very dangerous game Digby is suggesting. For what do the blogs really have going for them? Integrity. If we don't have that, we have nothing. We become the Right blogs. This is terrible thinking, especially coming from our best blogger.

The Mother Jones article sees the problem as one of personal aggrandizement and love of influence and money. In my experience, and I used to be an A-List blogger, it is not that at all.

The conduct of Senator Carl Levin on the Iraq War has clearly been the most disappointing and, in my opinion, most dishonorable among the "anti-war" Democrats. Today, he compounds his disrepute by misleadingly invoking Abraham Lincoln. Levin writes:

In his only term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln was an ardent opponent of the Mexican War. . . . But when the question of funding for the troops fighting that war came, Lincoln voted their supplies without hesitation.

This is incredibly disingenuous of Levin. He is misleadingly quoting a letter Lincoln wrote in 1858 while under political attack in a Senate race and trying to compare that with what he is saying and doing now. There are no pretty words to describe what Levin has done here - he has disingenuously and cravenly used Abraham Lincoln to defend his actions. Levin should defend his actions with his own honest arguments, not by the misleading tactics of the Right. He should be heartily ashamed.

Bob Geiger discovered that Fred Thompson writes a column at the ABC Radio web site. Bob spots this gem from the Washington lawyer-lobbyist turned Hollywood actor:

Harry Reid, though, has taken a different route. He made his statement about General Pace on a conference call with fringe elements of the blogosphere who think we're the bad guys. This is a place where even those who think the 9/11 attacks were an inside job find a home."

(Emphasis supplied.) As usual, Fast Freddie is fact-free. 3 of the callers were daily kos Contributing Editors. And at daily kos, in a policy I helped formulate in 2005, 9/11 conspiracy diaries are prohibited. It is a controversial policy in some parts of the Left blogs.

So sorry Frederick of Dollywood, but you can't apply your GOP/Hollywood game of changing the facts to suit your demagoguery. And you are fact-free yet again.

Honored at the Take Back America conference.

She makes us proud.

There is a name plate for Digby at the Take Back America conference. Does that mean Digby will be revealed? Atrios links to this funny post and to pictures of some of our good friends.

Sure there are lots of good things going at the conference I bet, but "who is Digby?" is the story of the day.

My day job takes me to Telluride today, where I'll be until Thursday evening. I'd love to stay for the Blue Grass Festival which starts Thursday, but I have to be back in Denver for court Friday afternoon and will miss it. Too bad, I even had a ticket.

We are excited to welcome one of the great folk-rock-soul bands of their generation, Counting Crows, to headline the opening night, Summer Solstice. We welcome back two of our all-time favorite performers after a year away: Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss. Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas will be performing both their own set of sophisticated newgrass and a special set with guitar legend Tony Rice featuring a spectrum of material from Tony's 35 year career. Los Lobos, a band that has been in existence for longer than Telluride Bluegrass, makes their debut at the Festival on Friday night.

The full lineup is here.

If you can't make Telluride, you can plan now for the Aspen-Snowmass Jazzfest Labor Day Weekend.

As I always say, 'tis a privilege to live in Colorado. This is an open thread, so please talk about whatever you want.

(Photo by Rashomon)

Via Matt Yglesias, the ugly face of the Right Blogosphere, duly endorsed by the all important Instapundit link:

Not that I'm saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold.

Perhaps we can all understand better now what we are dealing with. The violent hatred expressed by the Right is truly toxic. What say you Howie Kurtz? Joe Klein?

Happy Fathers Day, everyone. How about a Sunday open thread?

The must-read of the day in my view is Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib, The General's Report.

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint.

A sample of what we didn't see:

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees....Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it.

Why didn't we see them?

Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

More on Rumsfeld:

With all the activity this week, I forgot to do an open thread. Here it is. You pick the topics, we'll all just read along and respond.

It's our 5th blogiversary today. (Yes, as Skippy would say, we coined that phrase.) I'm really amazed. I had no idea when I sat at the computer one weekend in June, 2002 to create TalkLeft that I'd still be doing this five years later. There's no turning back now.

Thanks to all of you who read TalkLeft. You've made the time investment so worthwhile.

A little TalkLeft history for those who are interested, below the fold:

I'm always the last to know. From a diary at Daily Kos:

And today you have the opportunity to listen to [Big Tent Democrat, aka Armando on] On Topic at Political Nexus.  The show will begin tonight at 5pm PST (8pm EST)--those who wish to listen live can do so at the "On Topic" BlogTalkRadio page (the only show currently listed is the one we did with MSOC on abortion; it will appear when the show goes live.)  Otherwise, you can access the archives of the show either at Political Nexus or at the BlogTalkRadio On Topic page.

Among the topics we'll be discussing during the half-hour show include:

More...